Subject: Installation in IDEFS

From: Andy Piper <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 13:58:19 +0000

[Oops - my first attempt at posting this seems to have gone to
the wrong address. Sorry, Russell]

I've been 'lurking' on this list for a while now without
contributing, so I guess the first thing to do is say "hi". You
all seem to be discussing pretty low-level coding / conversion
issues, so I'm hoping what I want to ask isn't too simple!

A bit of background. I run Linux (heavily modified RH 5.1) on my
Intel box, and use HP-UX and AIX (plus NT - sigh!) at work. What
I really want to do is to install ARMLinux on my SA Risc PC. I
have the default 500Mb ADFS hard drive (almost full), plus a
CD-ROM drive, on the motherboard IDE interface. Last year I added
an APDL/Baildon Electronics IDE card, with a 2.1 Gb hard drive,
and so far I've not really been using it as much as I expected
to. So, once I felt more confident with Linux in general, I
cleared the drive, and decided to install ARM Linux from the Clan
CD.

Around Christmas I enquired on the Acorn newsgroups and
established that it should be possible to install to a drive on
an expansion card, - /dev/hdc in this case - and I was pointed in
the direction of you friendly, knowledgeable types for more
information. 

I've had huge problems getting the drive initialised with an
Ext2fs filesystem. !PartMan didn't want to know the drive
initially due to the IDEFS partition information on it. After
scrubbing various parts of the disc map with a disc editor I got
ADFS back to thinking it was unformatted, but the only way to
format it is to use the program which came with the card... which
essentially just writes more IDEFS information onto it. At one
stage I thought I'd succeeded in creating the right partitions,
but once I started the ARM Linux install (following Paul Vigay's
instructions) it became apparent that the partitions weren't
formatted correctly at all.

So - the 1 million Euro question - can I create the necessary
Linux partitions and install to this drive? I don't especially
want to go dismantling things, and move the extra hard drive to
where the CDROM drive currently is (although I realise that that
might give the CD drive better performance...!) - primarily
because I'm not sure I can juggle things so that the various
cables can reach to the new places.

Thanks for any advice.

-- 
Andy Piper                    [email-masked]
Fareham, Hampshire
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